The Monuments Men: A Story So Good, Burt Lancaster Told It 50 Years Ago

When you first heard about The Monuments Men you may have thought, Huh, so they made Ocean’s Eleven in World War II—I guess they passed on Ocean’s Eleven in space?

Then you took a closer look and saw that the film was actually about a real group of individuals who risked their safety to protect great works of art from theft and destruction at the end of World War II. Considering how every conceivable angle about the 20th century’s great madness has been featured in a major film, you may have thought, Wow, this is a curious historical footnote—I wonder why nobody has ever told this story before? You'd be right, except that this movie already came out 50 years ago.

I exaggerate tremendously, and yet there’s never been a better time to hop aboard The Train, a terrific and under-discussed John Frankenheimer film from 1964. It is an extremely fictionalized version of sections from Le Front de L'Art by Rose Valland, a curator in Paris's Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume during the war (played, under a different name, by Cate Blanchett in Monuments Men). The Jeu de Paume is a tennis court turned art museum in the Tuileries Garden, steps from the Place de la Concorde, and was the central repository of artwork that the Nazis looted from museums, galleries, and private collections, particularly those of Jewish collectors.

The Train begins as the war is ending, and a cunning S.S. Officer, played by Paul Scofield, recognizes the monetary value these works could have for a soon-to-be-crippled Germany. Or it could just be that he wants them. Or maybe he genuinely loves the artwork. As he gazes at a Gauguin, there's a moment where he's humbled—as much as anyone in a Wehrmacht uniform can look humbled. He even has some sympathy for the “degenerate paintings,” the ones that don't jibe with the Third Reich's official rules of aesthetics.

The Valland character recognizes that, in a way, Scofield's Colonel Von Waldheim has been an unlikely protector of the enormous collection throughout the war. “I knew of books being burned … other things,” French actress Suzanne Flon says in the movie's only—and thrown away—reference to the Holocaust. And after a moment of humanity between the two, Scofield clicks his heels, puffs out his chest, and barks to his agents like a typical movie Nazi—“I want these paintings on the train!"

Screenshot from The Train (1964)

France’s state-owned SNCF trains—the same ones that still zip from Paris to Avignon in just a few sun-dappled hours—worked in concert with occupying German forces. In addition to moving armaments and personnel, they transported close to 80,000 victims to Nazi extermination camps. Not everyone was thrilled about this, though, and many workers of the SNCF organized the Résistance-Fer, a group of saboteurs working along various lines throughout the country.

This brings us to Burt Lancaster, one of Hollywood's all-time great humanist tough guys, and the beefy hero of The Train. His Paul Labiche doesn’t care a whit about the train packed with paintings heading off to Germany. He’s not going to put his men’s lives on the line for a picture, not when they could be disrupting anti-aircraft tanks.

But the Valland character lays in with the guilt, talking about the National Heritage and Glory of France (forget that two of the names she mentions, Picasso and van Gogh, were a Spaniard and Dutchman). It seeds his patriotism, and when the train’s first engineer, played by jolly “Papa Boule,” is caught trying to sabotage the train and is shot by Scofield’s men, all it takes is one grimy black-and-white close-up in fabulous mid-60s widescreen to know that Lancaster is ready to risk it all for those Renoirs.

What follows is what critic Matt Zoller Seitz calls “the very first Joel Silver picture,”, full of speeding locomotives, strafing planes, explosions, crashes, machine-gun fights, dynamite, unsimulated leaps and dives (Lancaster’s career began as a circus acrobat, don’tcha know) and Germans yelling, “Schnell!” It's a mix of brute force, cunning, and, I kid you not, jokes about cheese.

Of course, almost none of the excitement seen in the movie really happened. Yes, there was an art train that tried to leave France that was delayed, but it wasn't quite so action-packed. While the new The Monuments Men doesn't have quite the same pugilism as The Train, it does have its share of energetic set pieces. It also adheres a little closer to history.

Of course, almost none of the excitement seen in the movie really happened. Yes, there was an art train that tried to leave France that was delayed, but it wasn't quite so action-packed. While The Monuments Men doesn't have quite the same pugilism as The Train, it does have its share of energetic set-pieces. It also adheres a little closer to history.

The Monuments Men moves its focus away from the French Resistance to detail the actions of the (very real, somewhat successful) division tasked with protecting the noble works of Man both from theft and wartime destruction. George Clooney, the director, also plays Harvard lecturer/curator George Stout, the eventual leader of the art-lovin’ group that includes Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Bob Balaban, Jean Dujardin, Hugh Bonneville, and John Goodman. Cate Blanchett plays the only character shared between the two films, the one based on Rose Valland, and this time we see how her documentation of the trafficked artwork saved so many pieces.

Frankenheimer’s film benefits from a specificity of focus (remember Scofield's order: “I want these paintings on the train!”), but Clooney's telling makes use of wartime's sprawl. As the characters disperse (and head to actual castles and salt mines, where art really was hidden), we see the interplay of ivory-tower idealism with boots-on-the-ground reality. Two members of the actual Monuments Men team were killed during the field operations. The specifics have been tweaked greatly to conform to the screenplay’s needs, but it is no exaggeration to say that scholars and conservators died for art.

Clooney's picture also retains some of the mid-century, Camelot-style secular liberalism that bounds off the screen in Frankenheimer's film. Something about tough guys duking it out over a still life will do that. Even the score to The Monuments Men, composed by Alexandre Desplat, feels like a response to Elmer Bernstein's inordinately catchy melodies in The Great Escape, another 60s classic about an odd, humanist moment in the war.

The Monuments Men concludes with George Clooney at a lectern explaining why putting men in harm's way for the sake of a picture is the right thing to do. The Train ends with Burt Lancaster shooting Paul Scofield with a machine gun. It’s a perfect point of comparison for the two films, greatly different takes on a single, amazing story that complement one another nicely.